u/mmmx115

Today marks the official start to free agency and I’m officially sick to my stomach.

We have 5 free agents who are out of contract at the end of the season.

-Sarah Gorden
-Claire Emslie
-Hannah Seabert
-Sophia Mattice
-Faith Nguyen

Excluding the two goal keepers where it’s not uncommon for the back up keepers to be on yearly contracts I am QUITE concerned about losing Sarah AND Claire.

**Sarah had a MUTUAL option for the 2027 season that seems to have been declined by one or both sides. That doesn’t necessarily mean she is leaving the club—but it doesn’t look great.

Similarly I’m concerned that Claire’s contract runs out at the end of the season and we do not have her locked in.

I’m going to assume the club will work hard to bring Lucy Rushton back to the AMBSE family and name her as the sporting director/GM of the new team.

The next most important sporting hire will obviously be our first manager.

There are two names I want to put on people’s radar early as who *I* would go after if I was in charge/who I think the club may look to target.

Carmelina Moscato - Carm is a young and hungry manager. Most importantly she’s was tapped as the technical director and Manager at Tigres Femenil and brought their very young team their first championship (and was one of Culebro’s first changes made when he was tapped president at Tigres). Since her time at Tigres, she had a brief stint at Racing Louisville as an assistant coach before leaving to manage in the Saudi league. This doesn’t quite tell her whole story—as she had a very successful tenure at Tigres—she left after the sudden passing of her Father and afterwards, she was heavily linked with both Angel City (as a supporter and stm for that club she was definitely promised a position and then they pulled it out from under her bc our FO/owners were publicly fighting with each other) and was also rumored to have been in the running for the CANXNT team before that job went to Casey Stoney. If she doesn’t become Atlanta’s first manager look to her being rumored once again with ACFC or likely replacing Casey Stoney after the 2027 World Cup.

Lorne Donaldson - He most recently was the had a brief stint as manager for the Chicago Red stars and before that he was the Jamaican WNT manager. Both stints were short lived but long time followers of the women’s game would say the lack of success at Chicago had nothing to do with coaching and everything to do with the ineptitude of the club’s front office, and ownership group and a roster that still to this day has major gaps. Similarly, Lorne got the most out of a severely underfunded Jamaican national team and his public comments about the federation’s substandard support of the team lead to his dismissal. Lorne is most known for running one of the biggest and most successful youth development programs in the United States out of Denver. With academy products by the names of Sophia Wilson and Mallory Swanson and Jaelin Howell as well as USMNT ALUM Ethan Horvath and Canadian National team player Tajin Buchanan, Janine Solis (Beckie.) I believe the Atlanta project would be lucky to have Lorne in the program to also be there to oversee the establishment of the development academy which won’t be a day 1 necessity but will become an early requirement of the young team as the league pushes to have every team have development teams in place within the next 4 or so years (the timeline on this keeps shifting.)

Both managers are known to get the best out of young squads, are familiar to new projects and I think would benefit from having a long run up to build a roster in their playing style. I also think both coaches would come in at reasonable rates, understand the NWSL landscape and we can better spend $$ on the roster than for manager with giant egos from overseas who don’t understand the NWSL’s landscape and style of play.